Louis Andriessen’s ‘La Commedia’: Opera is Hell

Last night marked the New York concert premiere of Louis Andriessen’s La Commedia, the Dutch composer’s 2008 “film opera” of five sections based on Dante’s epic poem, at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium. The Asko | Schoenberg ensemble, conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw, powered through Andriessen’s kinetic, textured score — injected with long stretches of jazz and big-band rhythms and even some driving “hard rock” riffs. Synergy Vocals and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus provided a strong choral foundation, engaging with the characters of “The Divine Comedy” as they journeyed from the City of Dis to Paradiso, covering a libretto in four different languages (English, Dutch, Latin, Italian) along the way.

Cristina Zavalloni sang the role of Dante, whipping her long, thin body about the stage. Also trained as a jazz singer, Zavalloni was singing a part composed especially for her; she’ll next star in Andriessen’s opera about Anais Nin, slated for this summer. Claron McFadden soloed as Béatrice, her clear soprano soaring over everything else. Marcel Beekman briefly appeared Casella, singing from the balcony.

But Jeroen Willems — an actor-singer Andriessen described as a “Dutch Jack Nicholson” in an interview earlier in the day — arguably had the most fun in La Commedia. He sang the parts of Lucifer and Cacciaguida, a mafioso-type in the last part of the opera who catalogues what’s gone wrong in Florence. Willems played Cacciaguida as a shambling late-night comic, bursting through the children’s chorus to rant about Ughis, Della Pressas and other “classy families” that have “go[ne] right down the tubes.” He mock-tripped over a cello pin and felt his way around the conductor’s stand, to the audience’s delight.

La Commedia is part of a series of events Andriessen has curated as the holder of the 2009-2010 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. The performances, running through this month with an additional concert in May, explore Andriessen’s work as well as the work of other composers and musicians that inspire him, including his own pupils, like composer Martjin Padding. Wednesday night featured a double bill of tap dancer Maurice Chestnut and singer-violinist Iva Bittová, as part of the series-within-a-series of improvisatory performances called “Three Naughty Boys and Three Crazy Girls.” Tonight, for the second installment in “Three Naughty Boys and Three Crazy Girls,” Andriessen will take the stage himself, accompanying singer Greetje Bijma on piano.

Andriessen may have more recently completed his meditation on “The Divine Comedy,” but he says he has carried a love for Dante for years. He first began reading Dante in the original Italian when he was living in Italy in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, he read “The Divine Comedy” in full for the first time when working on De Tijd (Time). De Tijd is another piece that references a classic text, in this case the “Confessions” of St. Augustine. De Staat, perhaps his most famous work, is about “The Republic” by Plato.

While based largely on “The Divine Comedy,” Andriessen’s opera also borrows from other texts and even paintings. “There are a lot of ghosts over the whole thing,” he said. Sections of La Commedia take their names from Hieronymus Bosch paintings: the first section is “The City of Dis or the Ship of Fools,” and the fourth section is “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” “Ship of Fools” is also a German satire from the end of the 15th century, and Andriessen has lifted text from the Dutch version. “I try to have some quotations, some allusions to Dutch culture at the same time,” he said.

What he calls “the deepest point” in La Commedia is another example of Andriessen’s quotations, and it also shows the import and agency he assigns to Lucifer. At the end of part three, Andriessen, channeling Dutch playwright Joost van den Vondel, has Lucifer quote God. “[He says,] ‘Seeing what is going to happen with mankind … I really regret I did create human beings,” says Andriessen. “Only Lucifer would dare say such a thing.”

Lucifer hardly plays a role in Dante’s poem, besides the episode in “Inferno” where the Pilgrim and Virgil use his massive, frozen body to climb out of Hell. But, Andriessen says, “he is the essence of the story of Creation.”

Andriessen spent four years composing La Commedia. In the process, he says, he also found a new way to talk about his work. One way to describe his work is as “quotation music,” lifting influences from diverse sources; Carnegie’s Geffen has described him as having an “omnivorous nature.”

“People say a little Stravinsky, a little this [as direct influences] in my music. But that’s not what’s I’m interested in,” Andriessen says. “What’s interesting is that I do jump. Whether it’s Stravinsky or not, what I have to tell about music, about language… is more like syntaxes.”

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